Skepticism

EVENTS

I’d watch it

But only to laugh at it. Some new pseudoscientific ‘documentary’ has been released this week, titled Sirius, which apparently has everything in it: conspiracy theories galore, ancient astronauts, zero point energy, pyramids, UFOs, antigravity, war, top secret government agencies, and aliens. One alien at least; the big feature proving the existence of aliens from outer space is dessicated, tiny little corpse of an “alien” found in the Atacama desert.

I saw that and knew immediately what it was. It’s human. It’s simply a mummified fetus, in which the plates of the skull (still quite distinct) have collapsed on themselves as the flesh dried out.

Here are a few shots of the obvious.

Apparently, the UFOlogists are all surprised now because they had a lab run some simple tests, and they returned the information that it was human — and an indigenous Chilean native, at that. Whoop-te-doo. Anyone other than a deluded fanatic could see that by just looking at the sad little thing.

You’d think they’d have done that before proclaiming it proof of alien visitation and such. I mean, I’m not a biologist, so ‘fetus deformed by mummification process’ didn’t occur to me on seeing the pictures, but checking to make sure that it is biological and isn’t something from Earth seems like a good set of steps when discovering any living/once-living tissue that might be extraterrestrial. Even if you believe panspermia, an life-form separated from terrestrial life for billons of years should at least as different on the cell/DNA/molecular level as we look from an E. coli bacterium or a sunflower or something.

I thought it was a horrible pile of PR bullshit that made love to Steven Greer’s face. All evidence is entirely glossed over — “we know there is overwhelming evidence for UFOs” after playing a few typical UFO-style videos — and the humanoid figure is, guess what, human. I believe the strongest statement their researcher made was “We can’t prove it’s not ET.” It’s really not even worth laughing at, for me anyway, it was just frustrating and sad.

Really, the strangest thing about all of this to me is that apparently somehow it can only be ‘alien’ if it’s vaguely human-shaped. I mean really, how likely is it that if it evolved on a distant planet it would still look similar to us? Life takes such an incredible variety of forms on this planet alone…

You’d think they’d have done that before proclaiming it proof of alien visitation and such.

Oh Becca, you naive child! Don’t you know that aliens is the best, first, explanation for anything weird?

All UFOs can be LGMs
Though recent claims are bolder,
For aliens (I’m glad to say) are in
the mind of the beholder.
If you’re properly hip,
Every blip’s a mother ship.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, he’s a lizard-man!)

This is a little OT, but I just had some lovely Jehovah’s Witnesses stop by and leave some literature. I was interested to learn that angels are spirit creatures, that usually help & protect us. However, “soon Jehovah will use the angels for a different purpose, to destroy the wicked”. Soooo… that kind of makes them scary aliens.

I’m also grateful this came up in my news feed ‘cos it set me on a webtrawl that lead me through photography of Atacama ghost towns (do go look, seriously) through the nitrate economy in Chile prior to the invention of the Haber process, the economics thereof, the crash that followed said invention, leading to those becoming ghost towns, the 1907 Santa María School massacre in Iquique (you want labour unrest? this is… notable), the prison camp Pinochet set up in one of those same towns, and so on…

Reality is way more interesting than anything the UFOlogists dream themselves up. By orders of magnitude.

saw a thumb nail of that on a huffington post headline the other day and thought no way am I going to go and look at that BS so thanks for checking it out.
these fools would know an alien if a “real” one walked up shook there hand.

Fernando, you probably won’t have to look very far to find UFOnauts as human time traveller theories.

The UFO crowd will be upset when the first aliens we meet, the Brizangdi, arrive, because they look pretty much exactly like giant ferrets. The Brizangdi will be less than amused when they find out that some humans keep ferrets as pets, given the resemblance.

So both this and the Starchild Skull are actually human remains from indigenous Americans. Are there any human remains getting passed off as aliens that are from white people?

It does seem like the logical progression of the dehumanizing “ancient aliens” bullshit. First they decide brown people are incapable of developing technology, then they declare the brown people remains they find aren’t even human.

Strangely, I’m reading that the scientist who did the DNA analysis is claiming that it’s the skeleton of a 6-8 year old boy — I don’t believe it. It’s 6 inches long, which would make it a fetus around 20 weeks postconception; assuming a fair amount of shrinkage during dessication, I could guess as late as 6-7 months. The pattern of bone ossification — notice, no sternum — fits that as well, but it doesn’t fit a 6 year old at all.

When you put it that way, it’s not too different from “brown people couldn’t have built the Benin Bronzes or Great Zimbabwe or the massive temples in Mexico or the mounds of Cahokia, they MUST have been a lost white civilization!” The only difference is that mainstream historians and archaeologists left those ideas behind decades ago, and most of the fringe recognizes that blatant racism isn’t socially acceptable. Usually.

Some new pseudoscientific ‘documentary’ has been released this week, titled Sirius, which apparently has everything in it: conspiracy theories galore, ancient astronauts, zero point energy, pyramids, UFOs, antigravity, war, top secret government agencies, and aliens.

So what’s the big difference between this movie and Thrive? Sounds pretty much the same.

Yes, I watched that thing. I watched the entire movie in the company of friends who loved it. There is a ready audience of spiritual-but-not-religious woo-sters who eat up movies like What the (Bleep).., Zeigeist, Thrive, and Sirius. The fans think the science is cutting-edge.

So you’d watch it, eh? Only to laugh?

Yeah, well … we’ll see who’s laughing, Mister, when they drag this thing out at the Paradigm Symposium and show it right before your speech — so you can’t leave. You may not feel so hearty afterwards.

When you put it that way, it’s not too different from “brown people couldn’t have built the Benin Bronzes or Great Zimbabwe or the massive temples in Mexico or the mounds of Cahokia, they MUST have been a lost white civilization!” The only difference is that mainstream historians and archaeologists left those ideas behind decades ago, and most of the fringe recognizes that blatant racism isn’t socially acceptable. Usually.

Some years ago, I got into an email argument with a 9/11 truther on a small politically oriented mailing list. He was incredibly obnoxious and I wouldn’t have bothered except that I didn’t want to see his views go unchallenged by anyone, for the benefit of the lurkers on the list.

This guy’s particular take on things was that Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC property at the time of the attack, was in league with the Bush administration to blow up the WTC with explosives (and also crash the planes into them?) in order to collect on the insurance money. Seriously. I kept trying to point out the numerous absurdities of Americans plotting a major terrorist attack for such an uncertain gain and with such huge negative consequences if they were ever found out.

I tried to point out the absurdity of a Jewish American working in league with radical Islamic extremists, but this guy seemed to have a serious racist hangup that prevented him from accepting the idea that a small motivated group of what he called “grumpy Muslims” (or maybe it was “irritated Arabs”, or something equally dismissive) could have the wherewithal to learn how to fly commercial airliners into large stationary objects. So instead he would rather believe in a massive conspiracy between Republicans and the WTC property owner to do a “false flag” operation for the political consequences (the so-called “Reichstag fire”) and for the money, respectively. That theory fit his stereotypes better, I guess.

The pattern of bone ossification — notice, no sternum — fits that as well, but it doesn’t fit a 6 year old at all.

Also notice the complete lack of wrist bones, kneecaps, and basically the ends of all long bones (huge gap in the knee).

It does seem like the logical progression of the dehumanizing “ancient aliens” bullshit. First they decide brown people are incapable of developing technology, then they declare the brown people remains they find aren’t even human.

I don’t think that’s intended. Lots of people simply have no idea of a human skeleton, let alone of what dried or rotting corpses look like. Remember the Montauk Monster? That’s what a raccoon looks like when it’s been drifting in water for some time, but few people know that; some, of course, declared it an alien.

Looks like any comment that is even remotely against the movie is getting automatically flagged as spam. Unhide them and you see the pattern that most of the film is rehashed UFO nonsense. Not sure you’d find it all that entertaining PZ.

For clarification, I’m all for funding the nonsense since it can be more entertaining than some Hollywood efforts. But at least put some effort into these things to make it new and shiny. Have pride your work…even if it is nonsense.

The link says that mini-alien-corpse has “well-formed teeth”. Isn’t that inconsistent with it being a fetus? Not that I see any sign of teeth, well-formed or otherwise, in the pictures, so that’s probably an error on someone’s part.